Audio Video News

At Sound & Vision, we’re constantly looking for subwoofers that outperform the competition and rise to the top of their price class. Here’s our list of the best subwoofers you can buy with recommendations in three price categories: less than $1,000, $1,000 to $4,000, and $5,000 and up.

If you rip CDs to your hard-drive-based car media system, does that violate the rights of artists? The Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies says yes, claiming that your system qualifies as a digital audio recording device, and therefore that manufacturers should pay royalties to the music labels. The group filed suit in the D.C. federal district court, alleging violation of the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA).

TV—specifically 4K/Ultra HD and OLED—top the holiday shopping lists of Sound & Vision readers who responded to last week’s poll question: “What’s Your Top AV Gift Pick for 2014?” Ultra HD netted 22 percent of the votes, followed by OLED TV (15 percent), AV receiver (14 percent), and headphones (9 percent). Regular old HDTV was a distant second to OLED, gaining only 4 percent of the votes, proving once again that the S&V crowd is all about the latest and greatest technology. Here are the full results:

Desperate to reverse declining movie attendance, the AMC theater chain plans to install reclining seats in 1,800 of its 5,000 theaters. The seats are so big that they had to remove up to two-thirds of seating capacity, leaving some theaters with as few as 70 seats. But attendance has shot up 80 percent in the renovated moviehouses, with box-office revenue rising 60 percent, and that may save theaters that were already losing money.

Dolby Atmos, the latest, “object-oriented” surround sound solution magicked up by the San Francisco technologists, has earned enough ink here and elsewhere that many of us are passingly familiar with it already. Briefly, then, object-oriented means that instead of panning discrete effects or overall mixes to left, center, right, or various surround channels, sound designers and producers can now direct sounds through a virtual listening space, letting the computer work out the details. Ultimately, of course, whether at the theater or at home, sounds still emanate from physical loudspeakers driven by physical amplifier channels, so there’s a certain amount of semantics at play here. But Atmos is scalable: A commercial theater can have as many as 64 discrete, individually addressable loudspeakers, including multiple “height” speakers in the ceiling.

Last Thursday Sharp Electronics introduced its latest Ultra HDTVs, along with a Wireless High Resolution Audio Player, at the Video & Audio Center in Santa Monica, CA.

The new AQUOS 4K UD27 lineup, available now, consists of two LCD models: the 70-inch LC-70UD27U ($3,600) and the 60-inch LC-60UD27U ($3,200)...